It’s official, folks. Your childhood just died a little bit. We knew that the show had been yanked from the lineup a little while ago, but today the news is confirmed: 20th Century Fox has yanked its deal away from Channel Ten, meaning the Australian broadcaster will no longer be the free-to-air home of The Simpsons. Hell damn fart.
The termination of the content agreement between Fox and Ten had been delivered verbally earlier in the month, but written confirmation was delivered to the ASX yesterday afternoon, bringing the US broadcasting giant’s long-running relationship with Network Ten to an unceremonious close.
This announcement effectively erases all hope of resurrecting the Fox deal under Ten’s new ownership group CBS, who likely would’ve viewed the deal as a needless expense given their own existing content library.
Fox withdrawing from the deal means other programming like Modern Family, M*A*S*H*, and Futurama – all shows that occupied significant chunks of Ten’s schedule – will also disappear for good from the network’s lineup.
While the hole in the schedule left by Fox’s withdrawal will be sizeable, the trade-off for the struggling network is a monetary saving reportedly in the millions upon millions of dollars; cash that, under a new CBS-ownership model, could be used to fund additional locally produced programming.
Ten has been broadcasting Fox programs into Australia for some 25 years, which included regular nightly runs of Simpsons episodes in the 6pm timeslot that became a staple of many young Australians formative years, helping the series develop the unusually rabid following that it has in the country.
The CBS takeover of Ten is still facing legal hurdles, with representatives in court today to face an attempt to prevent the sale going through by a pair of minor stockholders.
Now look sad and say d’oh.
